1. Field of the Invention
This invention is a tool designated to introduce safety and speed in accurately placing a joist hanger into a proper position to be secured. This invention works both before and after the joist itself is secured.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Joist hangers are a necessary part of construction in which a metal bracket is used to secure dimensional wood to a header or ledger often at 90 degrees to the dimensional board and various angles in between. The desire for a tool that can speed up the process of installation while being accurate and safe for the user has existed since hanger use was required. There have been several joist hanger tools invented to try and achieve this in the past. These prior art devices have achieved some of their intended goals but most fail in the safety or productivity area. All, however, fail in the area of being a useful tool before and after the joist has been installed. Often due to increased labor forces it is not productive to install joist hangers before installing joists. Often decks and floors are production framed which requires joist hangers to be installed after the fact. Another problem occurs when lumber is not dimensional; i.e. 2″×12″ is 11-½″ on one end and 11-¼″ on the other, which is often the case. This requires the joist to be installed first and hangers to be installed after the fact to get the same level at the top of the joists in order to receive flooring or decking boards. If a deck needs to be built and the supply center has run out of those needed hangers, paying a crew of workers to stand around and wait on someone to find hangers is not cost effective.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,947,616 positions a joist hanger using the top edge of a header. This device uses magnets to hold the sides of the hanger at their proper width and needs to be adjusted to use. The 616 device also requires the user to provide hand pressure close to the area to be nailed and is therefore unsafe and cannot be used after the joist is placed.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,054,755 uses a spring biased projection in its hand tool for mounting joist hangers and as designed is incapable of exactly flushing out both top of the header and joist as the joist hanger thickness was not taken into account during design. This device does not remove the user's hand from the immediate vicinity of the nail gun. It does not maintain the sides of the hanger and cannot be used after the joist has been secured.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,126,156 discloses a tool for supporting a joist hanger during application of the hanger to the joist. The tool will need to be tilted back and forth to accommodate various heights in hangers and this tilt will potentially cause a poorly adjusted height. The tool cannot be used after the joist is attached.
It is an object of the present invention to have a tool that's effective both before and after the joist has been secured. Other objects of this invention are to provide a safe distance between a nail gun or hammer and the hand using the tool; maintain visibility of layout marks; be affordable; minimize labor cost on joist hanger installation and improve productivity; be able to fit into a carpenter's pouch, on a nail and in a hammer holder; made from plastic to eliminate extra weight on a carpenter's pouch; and repeated accuracy and uniformity.